{"id":152,"date":"2008-05-09T08:53:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/09\/the-bourne-supremacy\/"},"modified":"2012-02-18T08:20:52","modified_gmt":"2012-02-18T14:20:52","slug":"the-bourne-supremacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/09\/the-bourne-supremacy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bourne Supremacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joanna Bourne, author of The Spymaster’s Lady<\/span>, does not have much of a web presence. But she does have a blog, and she’s posted a most useful writing class<\/a>, the beginning of a series.<\/p>\n

Example<\/p>\n

Word choice: Superfluous ‘that\u2019s’.
<\/span>
At the polishing stage of the redraft, do a search on ‘that’. Every time a sentence reads fine without ‘that’, pull it out.<\/p>\n

Not \u2013 It is clear that Joanie dunks donuts.
<\/em>But — It is clear Joanie dunks donuts.
<\/em>Or better … Clearly, Joanie dunks donuts<\/em>, which frees the predicate from the verb ‘to be’, which is nearly always an improvement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you care about the employment and deployment of language in your writing, head over and read. She gives great examples–I can’t learn without examples–and you are definitely learning from a master here. And even if you already know how to structure a sentence for maximum clarity, efficiency, and impact, you should still head over and read. It never hurts to review what you know.<\/p>\n

(I would love to be able to give similar lessons, but I don’t know a predicate from a syndicate and judging by my desperate word-stripping during the page proof phase of Delicious<\/span>, I still use far, far too many words.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joanna Bourne, author of The Spymaster’s Lady, does not have much of a web presence. But she does have a blog, and she’s posted a most useful writing class, the beginning of a series. Example Word choice: Superfluous ‘that\u2019s’.At the polishing stage of the redraft, do a search on ‘that’. Every time a sentence reads … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1334,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions\/1334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}